


Ephemera

by woodironbone



Category: 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future - Jon Bois
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-typical swearing, Cross-Country Travel, Domesticity, Gentleness, Gift Fic, Immortality, M/M, POV Alternating, Present Tense, Yuletide, Yuletide 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:27:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28140126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodironbone/pseuds/woodironbone
Summary: Nick and Manny make their way across time and space.
Relationships: Manuel "Manny" Baez/Nick Navarro
Comments: 12
Kudos: 19
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Ephemera

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kastaka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kastaka/gifts).



> So I wanted to chart Nick and Manny’s path through both the country and the story, and to that end I did a truly ridiculous amount of cross referencing and research to map out their actual route as seen [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbj5RXT6HcI). Let me tell you I was thrilled to determine they spent a lot of time on the Minnesota field, thus enabling me to make many fond dunks on my very own home state.
> 
> This was super fun and fulfilling to write, and I really hope you enjoy it. Happy Yuletide!
> 
> Huge thanks to my three dear friends who made this possible via encouragement and support, teaching me about San Diego food, and providing much-needed consultation on speculative pumpkin husbandry.

**•**

Dawn of the day that shall define all others. Air still cool from the night, enough blue-grey light to see by with twenty-five minutes ‘til sunrise. Twenty-five minutes ‘til the light climbs over the horizon to shine direct into their eyes, by which time they better be headed north anyway. Dawn of the day that will be an end to one thing and the start of another, even if that’s just a story they tell in their heads. When life goes on and on and on, when the whole world has been contained for 1,500 years within one tiny-ass sliver of San Diego 160ft wide from border to beach, symbolic markers become real damn important. 1,500 years drawing a map of a journey toward something in their heads, to escape the confines of border-to-beach. From signing up for the program to this, the day that shall define all others, hundreds of milestones, some centuries apart and some only hours: _That was the day we met, and that was the day we committed to the plan, and that, the day we realized we were the same kind of crazy. That was the day I realized I loved you. That was the day we first kissed. That was the day you told me you loved me before I could get the words out, and I said “Fuck it” and proposed. That was the day we beat our five mile record, and that, the day we beat it again, and that, the day Coach decided we were ready._

_And this is the day we prove it._

This is the day that shall define all others because what comes next will depend on whether they’re on BSU’s field before the sun rises or whether the weight of fifteen centuries comes crashing down around them.

“If we don’t make it,” Manny had said after Coach had decided they were ready, “first thing I’m doing is going for a goddamn swim.”

“We’ll make it,” Nick had answered. It was all he said, all that needed to be said, because Manny had known it was obvious how scared he really was.

He’s not scared now, though, in the blue-grey light of pre-dawn with the desert stretched ahead. He looks at Nick and finds him already looking, smiling like he does, cocky and competitive, like he’s issuing a challenge. Like he knows he’s right and you know he is, too. It’s annoying as often as it is beautiful. It was the way he smiled when he realized he’d beaten Manny to it, said _I love you_ , first, and the way he kept smiling when Manny kissed him before he could even answer _Yes_.

They don’t say a word. They’ve been doing this too long for that. It’s all instinct now: body language and scent and sound. Far, far away, in distant orbit, the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer says to no one in particular, “aaand they’re off!”

Nick and Manny tear across that desert like a pair of angry gods. Like two arrows fired from the same bow, moving with near impossible synchronicity. They know each other’s pace better than they know anything. They know their breath, their resting heart rates, their rhythms both natural and learned. They are hauling ass. They are _busting_ ass. They move like it’s a goddamn biological imperative.

They cross into the BSU field before sunrise. Nick is already checking their time. Manny turns back to see the still-dissipating dust clouds they left in their collective wake. An arc that took fifteen centuries to resolve, already fading in the sand.

“Not even nineteen minutes,” Nick gets out between breaths, and when Manny looks he sees a smile that’s a little looser, a little wilder than the usual one. “Holy shit. 18:57. That’s—that’s almost four minutes a mile. Not even nineteen—babe, we still have seven goddamn—”

He doesn’t finish how many minutes they still have, because Manny grabs him by his sweat-soaked shirt and kisses him, and they’re a little clumsy with combined adrenaline but Nick still smiles into it like it’s the first time.

  
  


**⇒⇑⇒⇑⇒**

  
  


“I’m just saying we could’ve taken Georgia Southern a little fucking further,” Manny grumbles.

“This was your idea.” Nick doesn’t look up from the map. They’re both crouched low at the edge of the treeline waiting for the highway to clear and he’s still looking for alternative routes. They’ve come this far without being noticed and Nick’s not about to let anyone spot them crossing the highway.

“I’m not saying it wasn’t, man, I’m just saying we _could’ve_.” Manny pulls tucks his chin deep under his scarf and stuff his gloved hands under his armpits. “I’m not saying it like it’s anyone’s fault, I mean, it’s my fault, obviously. I am airing my fuckin’ regrets. Humans were not made for twelve degree winters.”

“Gets way, way colder further north.” Nick huffs out a breath that fogs the air as he folds up the map and tucks it away. “I read somewhere that some winters up by the boundary waters it gets colder than the surface of Mars.”

“That’s bullshit. No way that’s not bullshit.”

“That’s what I read.” Nick shrugs. “I think it’s possible if you consider Mars doesn’t have the same surface temperature all over.”

“Well then…” Manny scrunches up his face in a frown. His face is barely visible between scarf and big woolen hat but Nick can see his eyebrows and he knows that look. Like he’s pouting, but he’s really just thinking while distracted or hungry or tired. Fucking adorable is what it is, but Nick knows when not to say so.

“That’s kinda weak,” Manny finally concludes. “I mean, you say ‘oh, it’s colder than Mars,’ people think you’re talking like _uninhabitably_ cold. Then it’s like oh, well, _technically_ , surface temperature and shit. It’s like a fun fact you can only get to with this big boring loophole.”

“I’m just saying it could be worse is all,” says Nick. He thinks the loophole makes it more interesting, really, and anyway, who the hell are they to question loopholes? Any other moment and that’d be an argument, but he’s too busy watching the road. “Okay, fuck this, I think we’re clear after this truck. You good?”

“If I knew we’d be cutting highways wearing two pairs of socks at once I’d have suggested we just stay on Georgia Southern.” Manny gets to his feet with a weary groan. It’s been weeks since they slept in a bed and they still have miles of farmland to cover. Manny’s carrying a heavy-duty tent and cooking supplies, Nick’s got the sleeping bags and everything else. They take turns carrying the heater. Right now it’s Nick’s turn.

“Georgia Southern’s too active right now,” Nick says, eyes trained on the truck making its rattling way toward them. “And it’s like you said, if we’re angling for GTech we should cut a wide path. Gather as much intel as possible on the way down. This was the right move.”

“Then we shoulda timed it so it would not be fucking December.”

“Okay, yeah,” Nick concedes as the truck blows past. “I did think about that. I should’ve said so.”

They wait until the truck disappears over the next rise and no traffic follows before sprinting across the highway and into tree cover on the opposing side. Nick hates running in these conditions, the packs heavy and cumbersome, the roads slick and slushy, the bitter cold air stinging his lungs. But he’s not in the mood to complain. It’s Manny’s turn for that, anyway.

“Yeah, why _didn’t_ you?” Manny wants to know as they press on eastward.

A good question, and one Nick was asking himself for a while when they started heading north. Why he thought about bringing it up but never did. He always knew the answer, though he tried to deny it because it felt pretty stupid. Still does. He trudges along in silence until they come to a downed tree, branches cracked under the weight of snow. Then he admits, “I kinda wanted to see what it was like,” because life’s too long to be afraid of sounding a little stupid in front of his husband.

Manny finishes helping Nick over the tree before giving him an assessing look. “You better be fucking with me.”

“You know why they never went in for climate control up here?” Nick squints into the sky, at the heavy clouds that seem to be constantly threatening snow without ever following up, before returning his attention to their sometimes treacherous path. “It’s because they’re all so proud of how goddamn cold it gets. That’s the culture. They’re tough as nails and we’re wimps for wearing jackets when it drops to sixty.”

“Yeah, I know. And then they turn around and try to act like sriracha is hot.”

Nick snorts softly. “Fuck, I miss hot sauce.”

“Right? Or like real salsa.”

“Man, you know what I could fuckin’ go for right now is some carne asada fries.”

“Aw, fuck, don’t. I’m too hungry for this.”

“You know they got a kind of cheeseburger up here where they melt cheese _inside_ the burger patty?” Nick grunts as he adjusts the dragging weight of the heater from one hand to the other. “But I bet you anything they’d think a California burrito was too much.”

“Baby, please. I’m starving.”

Nick is starving too, which is why he wants to talk about all the food they can’t have, but he decides to let Manny have this one. So they’re quiet for a while longer, moving slowly through the woods with only the soft crunch of their footsteps, the persistent creak of windblown pines, and occasional searing rush of traffic on wet pavement for company. Then Manny says, “You better be shittin’ me that you wanted to see what it was like.”

It catches him off guard; he’d almost thought Manny was going to let that go, and Nick almost laughs. “I mean! Fuck, I knew we could handle it,” he says. “We’d stick it out because we had to. Plus, winters are _long_ here. Like, until April, sometimes. I didn’t want to pull us off schedule that long just to prove the northerners right.”

“And look, we’re provin’ ‘em right anyway.”

“C’mon, man, you knew just as well as I did what we were getting into. You can’t tell me you suggested we take Minnesota and didn’t think about how long it was gonna take and when it was gonna happen. So what’s your excuse?”

Manny’s silence has a certain sulky quality to it Nick knows well enough to recognize even when he can only see the back of him.

“I was kinda curious, too,” he mutters finally.

Nick does laugh this time, stops and doubles over laughing, until Manny slips his pack down from his shoulders and declares, “Fuck you. We’re making camp.”

  
  


**⇒**

  
  


“Do you ever think about how long it’s been?” Nick says, and Manny starts like he’s been jostled awake. He hadn’t been asleep, hadn’t been able to with the constant groan of snow-burdened trees outside the tent, but he isn’t willing to give that up just yet.

“Since what?” he grumbles, his voice hoarse from the cold, dry air. They’re bundled close in their shared sleeping bag, the heater providing a little oasis of warmth that still doesn’t feel like enough.

“That we’ve been alive.”

“Nick…” Manny lifts his head just enough to squint at the top of Nick’s head, his hair matted from being stuck under a hat all day. He’s staring up at the canopy of canvas above them as if it were a starry sky, something more suited to such contemplations. Manny drops his head back down and mutters, “It’s like one in the morning.”

But he knows Nick gets stuck unable to sleep sometimes even without the oppressive natural soundscape, and he knows, too, that Nick probably knew he was awake by his breathing, so he sighs and flops onto his back to join his husband in that upward gaze with no view worth dwelling on.

“Sometimes,” he admits, though it probably isn’t as often as Nick thinks about it. “Just like… hits me every once in a while. Then I find something else to think about.”

“Sometimes shit comes back to me about my childhood,” says Nick. “Outta nowhere. Just like a random memory about, I don’t know. Something stupid, usually. Sneaking out of bed early on Saturdays to watch cartoons. And every time it’s like, who _is_ that kid? He was a different person.” He pauses, but after 1,500 years Manny knows the flavor and variation of all Nick’s pauses, and he waits for Nick to continue: “I mean, he _was_ a different person. We all were. None of us knew this was where we’d end up. You live different when there’s a deadline.”

Manny hums in acknowledgment but still he says nothing. Part of the reason he doesn’t dwell on this much is he outright avoids it, because there is simply too much—not even in a sense of it being overwhelming, though it certainly was at first. Now, it’s just too much to hang onto, period. He doesn’t like to wonder about how much he’s forgotten, if there’s stuff that was important once that he’s forgotten how to miss. Because there must be, and he worries if he gets stuck thinking about that, he’ll never come back out.

“What year were you born?” he asks after a moment. “You remember?”

Nick breathes out noisily, all frowning concentration. “19… 8… 86.”

Been a long fucking time since four-digit years, and it takes Manny a reflexive split second to parse that, even though he knows what Nick meant. “1986,” he clarifies with a little smirk. That sounds right. Those dates are printed on their player IDs, but it’s been a long, long time since they had to even think about those.

“Pretty sure.”

“Well.” Manny rolls onto his side, shifting closer, his hand grasping clumsily for Nick’s. “I got two whole years on you.” Hand found, he twines their fingers together and leans in to plant a little kiss on Nick’s temple. “You’re a baby.”

Nick turns in toward the kiss, eyes closed, and for a moment it seems like he might drift off like that, but Manny knows better than to expect it.

“I’m sorry,” Nick mumbles, sleepy but not enough, like he could sense Manny waiting. “Can’t get my brain to shut up.”

Manny doesn’t move, just lies there a moment like he might be asleep. Then he says, “Tell me about the pumpkin again.”

Nick loves talking about this fucking pumpkin. Manny really couldn’t care less. But he likes it when Nick gets excited, even in a distant, half-listening kind of way, and sometimes it’s that kind of thing—just the familiar pattern of telling a known story—that can manage to settle an overactive brain. Even one as overactive as Nick’s.

“It’s only like twenty miles north of us right now,” Nick says without missing a beat, as though they’d already, in perpetuity, been talking about this fucking pumpkin. “It’s a goddamn travesty. If I were getting into pumpkin husbandry I’d fuckin’ build that directly on the field.”

“Get some enrichment in the football enclosure,” Manny says sleepily, thinking about a video he saw once, millennia ago, of a lion playing with a pumpkin full of ground meat. He still remembers shit like that better than he remembers his abuela’s voice, the one who didn’t quite make it to the ongoing now.

“Yeah, yeah, exactly,” says Nick, though Manny knows he wasn’t really listening. “Think of what an amazing position that’d put you in. If you were a UMN fan? Shit. All the intel you could get just by forcing players to navigate around your bigass pumpkin.”

“Gopher for the Gophers,” Manny says, still sleepily.

“ _Exactly_ ,” Nick says, forgiving the pun by way of wrapping one arm around Manny and pulling him in. “I mean, it would’ve changed the dynamics of the field and we probably couldn’t have actually come this way if that were the case, but… Well, anyway. So there’s this farmer up there who decided in, I dunno, the 16,900s or so, to get into pumpkin husbandry. And she was late to the party, I mean real late. Before, like way back, there was a new record for world’s biggest pumpkin every couple years, it wasn’t really something people held onto long. But they finally hit a ceiling in like… 12,000-something. I think it was someone up in Canada somewhere. They found the upper limit, and past that point it’s just untenable. Pumpkins can’t bear their own weight or they get too hardened and start to crack, or whatever. There’s a lot that can go wrong, even with unlimited time and resources. There’s still shit you can’t counteract. And I mean, they did try, for a while. You had this very niche group of competitive landrace pumpkin farmers, breeding pumpkins for generations to be specifically optimized to the soil and the climate, the, you know, the _terroir_. But eventually people got tired of trying. And then this farmer just north of here comes along, almost 5,000 years late. She’d been raising landrace pumpkins pretty much forever, never competitively, but then one day apparently she just decides to get into it. And I mean _into it_. She built a greenhouse that was like a massive dome across the field, keeps it super arid to help mitigate rot, had already been breeding a strain where the seeds wouldn’t propagate and compromise the internal integrity, like... she basically neutered this pumpkin. She has it set up so it rolls back and forth across the whole dome to keep it evenly balanced, like a fuckin’ gas station hot dog. The whole 9,000 yards. And she managed to grow this one pumpkin for five years, and by then she’d just _barely_ broke the all-time record, by a handful of pounds. But it was a huge deal, this great feat of modern farm engineering, so on. So for a while everyone was waiting to see what the new upper limit was, and then… like, this thing was as big as a house and a major tourist attraction.”

Manny’s barely listening, could drift right off now, but he knows potent pause when he hears Nick Navarro make it. “And then?” he murmurs.

“And then,” Nick says, a grin audible in the subtle change of his voice, “the nanos designate this fucking pumpkin a structure. I mean it makes sense, kind of, this huge thing everyone’s paying attention to. But now everyone’s real steamed because they say it can’t count as the world record anymore, because we don’t actually know if it would’ve kept growing or not. Now that the nanobots are maintaining it, it’s just… fixed. No growth and no decay. So what does that mean? Can you theoretically get bigger than that, even? I mean, you try explaining all this to the nanos. But to me it doesn’t really matter. This farmer beat an unbeatable record and got landmark status for it, all because she felt like it. I think she earned it. You know? That’s like a whole new arena of competitive plant husbandry. Nice squash, but can you get the nanos to take note.”

Manny is far closer to sleep now than Nick, but that’s okay, too. It’s nice listening to him when he builds up a head of steam—the gentle vibration of his voice, the subtle changes in his heartbeat. He chuckles in soft, sleepy acknowledgment of the story’s end, then fidgets drowsily, burrowing against Nick’s arm. “I never knew you were so into pumpkins.”

“I’m not, really,” Nick says. “I just like people doing crazy, impossible shit because they have time to try.”

“Mm.” Manny’s close to sleep, but not so close he can’t appreciate that. The thing they have in common. The thing that got them married. The thing that led them here. “Well, when all this is all over, we’ll go see it.”

Nick’s body moves in such a way that Manny can tell he’s smiling down at him. “Babe, when all this is over, we’re never coming back.”

Manny smiles, provisionally warm and cozy in the curl of Nick’s arm. “Even better.”

  
  


**⇒⇓⇘⇓**

  
  


It would be incorrect to say the days have started to blur together, if only to be pedantic. Nick has been acutely aware of that blurring for a long, long time, long before they (the devils, they joked for a while) went down to Georgia. A side effect of forever. The acuity of that awareness is sort of funny, considering what a vague thing it is, and considering how distant everything else always feels. Life is a blur and the only sharpness to it is his own needling consciousness. Then again, he’s pretty sure it’s always been that way.

He remembers life before, sort of. Remembers it vaguely, distantly, and with a constant brimming uncertainty about whether he imagined it or not, how much he actually remembers and how much he’s projected onto himself (and whether the difference actually matters). More than anything that happened to him, the places he lived or the people he knew, he remembers how it felt: the anxiety of living what he’d believed would be a short life. He knows that even as a kid he’d been frantic about it. If he ever perceived the natural dilation of time, he’d lock up, thinking about how little time he _has_ , really, and how desperately he needs to hold onto it, use it, never miss a second. Relaxation and boredom felt like moral failures. Even when he got older and realized how pointless that was, how much time was actually wasted struggling to make every second count, he couldn’t let go of it. He’s not sure he ever did let go of it, not completely. He remembers that, too, how long it took him to really trust his functional immortality. To fall in with the rest of humanity on this collective effort toward recreation. It took him tens of thousands of years to get past feeling like he needed to _keep busy_ , and even now, he can’t fully lose his sense of time, at least not without noticing he’s lost it.

They’ve been in Georgia a long fucking time, is the thing, and the days sure do blur, and even though it hasn’t been as long as they spent training in San Diego, Nick’s pretty sure they’d both agree this is worse. San Diego, even a barely adequate sliver of it, was home. The ocean was there, even if they couldn’t go in it. They had a plan, a tangible goal and destination. And they didn’t have to play undercover, and they didn’t have to spend the mounting centuries mostly stuck in variously shitty little apartments. There were highs; they fell in love, they got married. Here, the pleasure of getting a home together has been repeatedly undercut by the sheer tedium of masquerading as homeowners.

Sometimes they’re so tired of each other they barely speak at all for days on end. They do their workout routines apart, or together but in silence. Nick reads and Manny watches TV, their only interaction being a slew of links texted from Nick to Manny, mostly going ignored. Then they swing back as though nothing happened, smiling and laughing and pulling each other into bed; then, a few weeks or months later, they repeat the process. As a routine, it’s not a bad one. It doesn’t stem from unhappiness or tension. It’s more of a necessity; a gradually expanding shared silence, tidal in scope as the years drag on. Comes more naturally to Manny than Nick, who used to feel like silence was an expectation to speak. But he got used to it, the way he did everything else. Grew to need it, the same way a body needs sleep.

When Nick was a kid, the kind of relationship advice he clung to most was always about finding ways to keep things interesting. Dulling the boredom, back when nobody knew what boredom really was. Now, he’s pretty sure it’s not about that at all. It’s knowing that Manny will always be there, ignoring most of the stuff Nick sends him to read, and then not knowing the things Nick wanted him to know. Knowing Manny will never charge his phone, will always do that thing where he sulks after an argument, sulks so hard he ends up hauling Nick into an irritable hug like he wants to just bully them both past the moment, and it works every time because he’s adorable and because they never remember why they were annoyed even minutes later. Knowing that when they’re bored or frustrated or lost, they’re doing it together. A relationship isn’t keeping shit interesting. It’s _wanting_ to be bored together. It’s finding someone you like so much that you don’t mind being bored out of your goddamn skull because you’re stuck in a 160ft wide strip of Fayetteville where there is fuckall to do, and even if the days haven’t only just started to blur together, they have started to blur in the most monotonous way yet.

Nick hasn’t shared these thoughts with Manny. He’s not sure Manny would agree, and it isn’t a point he’s interested in arguing. It’s all semantics anyway, whether you frame the comfort and familiarity as a welcome sort of boredom or as ‘keeping things interesting.’ Maybe it’s both. Manny telling the same dumb jokes he’s told for thousands of years and Nick still laughing every time. Manny making the same handful of meals the same way for almost just as long, and Nick still loving his cooking, still, always, hungry for more. Every once in a great while there’s a surprise, even if it’s just a little one. The most exciting thing they’ve done in the past hundred years is acquire a betta fish, and the best surprise about that was how exciting it actually was. Manny had never kept a fish before; it was Nick’s suggestion, Nick’s thing to care for something so finicky and particular, but Manny took to it with an intense seriousness Nick found unbelievably charming.

But that’s become as familiar and comfortable as the rest of it, and now, he thinks, they’re due for another change. Desperate for it, in fact. There’s no danger, not to their relationship, not to their singular known goal of replenishing their OBT. But Nick is restless. He can’t stop being restless. That never faded, not for immortality, not for anything. He’s grateful to it, in a way. Without that, he’d never have made it this far.

“I think we should move to Atlanta,” he says.

Manny startles, looks up from his phone. They’re sitting angled toward each other at opposite ends of their modest couch, which means they’re practically curled together, legs resting against one another as they each do their own thing in long-standing quiet. This is the first thing Nick’s said since their brief morning acknowledgment of one another, and it’s caught Manny off guard.

“Yeah?” he says, a little wary.

Nick turns his own phone around to show Manny what he’s been looking at, which is a real estate listing for a condo. Manny hesitates before reaching out to take it, his expression neutral as he scrutinizes it. Behind him, on the end table, Clancy swims around his tank, which is probably more proportionally spacious than their apartment is to them.

“Right near the top of the northeast corner,” Nick tells him even as he looks at it. “It’s almost right on top of the field intersection. It’s perfect.”

“Looks like it’s right on the edge,” Manny says.

“Yeah, we might not be able to take the elevator, but the stairs will be good for supplementing the treadmill.” Nick’s not concerned by Manny’s lack of enthusiasm, which is to be expected. He leans back, wanting to stretch his legs out but not wanting to invade Manny’s space any further until he knows what kind of conversation this is gonna be.

Manny pokes around the listing a bit longer, then looks up at him. “You sure they’re not gonna be suspicious?” he says. “I mean, it’s like a _stupidly_ good location.”

“I think it’ll be okay,” says Nick. “Our cover story’s been holding so far. And like… no one’s going to double check our history to look at where our addresses have been. They’re just gonna see the century-plus of living around the area.” This time, when Manny doesn’t answer, looking back at the phone, Nick fidgets a little and says, “This was always the plan, man.”

“I know.” Manny hands the phone back. “I’m just, like… it feels big.”

“It is.” Nick takes his phone and toys with it, wanting to reach for Manny’s hand instead, though he doesn’t, yet. “I mean, maybe we won’t see how big for another hundred years, but… that’s where I want to be. Waiting on the edge of it, not out here.”

“Yeah.” Manny hesitates a moment longer, then says, “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m like… scared, or something.”

Nick blinks, surprised by the vulnerability even though he really shouldn’t be—surprised he still manages to be surprised sometimes. Then he sets his phone aside and forgoes all his weird hesitations, reaching out and pulling Manny’s hand into his.

“We’ve been waiting a long fuckin’ time,” he says. “And nothing’s gonna change, not really. We’ll still be waiting.”

“I know.” Manny doesn’t look at him, but he strokes his thumb gently back and forth over Nick’s, a comforting habit for both of them. “And man, I don’t want to get comfortable here. I don’t want to feel sedentary. So this is—this’ll be good.”

“Yeah.” Nick smiles, leans in and brushes a kiss against Manny’s temple. He pulls back, lets the moment linger a bit before saying, “So I put an offer on it two days ago.”

Manny pulls his hand away in a reflexive jerk. “You what?”

“Look, I knew it was—”

“Why the fuck are you only showin’ it to me now, then?!”

“Because I knew it was perfect, and we needed to scoop it up fast, I knew you’d get nervous.” Nick knows, too, that doing it this way would piss Manny off; he even knows Manny’s _right_ to be pissed off. He knew he was about to ruin a perfectly good moment. He knew for the whole two days he spent psyching himself up to do it.

“What the fuck, Nick?” Manny’s angry, but he’s angry the way Manny gets angry—shocked, annoyed, somehow with a persistent thread of fondness mixed in somewhere. Nick never points it out—wouldn’t really be fair to point it out—but he always feels it, that no matter how pissed Manny gets, there’s still something under there that’s closer to affection than real anger. There he goes, my idiot husband, doing the exact kind of bullshit he always does best.

“I’m sorry,” Nick says, and he means it. “I just… I saw it when you were asleep, and I didn’t want to wake you up, and I panicked. I just wanted to get our foot in that door. I knew it was gonna be hard and I just… I wanted to make it easier for you. I didn’t want you stressing about it.”

“Fuck’s sake, Nick…” Manny presses a hand over his face and huffs out a heavy, short breath before pushing his fingers up to scrub through his hair. “You don’t need to like… protect me from that shit. Maybe I deserve to be stressed about it. Maybe I _want_ to be. We do shit together. We’re a team.”

“I know. I know,” Nick says, finally looking away, a concession to his own guilt. His ears feel hot. “I knew I should’ve just waited. Or just gone and woken you up. But I didn’t, and then…” He shrugs. It was too late after that, but he knows that isn’t really the point.

“Jesus.” Manny stares irritably at the wall for a few long seconds before he seems to just let it go, mimicking Nick’s shrug, tension slipping down from his shoulders in resignation. “Okay.”

“Manny, I’m sorry,” Nick says again, softly, as if he isn’t sure Manny heard him the first time.

“I know you are.” Manny sighs and looks at him, his expression back to something a little more neutral. Tired, but somewhere in there, fond. Then he nudges Nick with his foot, not hard enough to be a kick. “So?”

Nick knows he’s being let off the hook, and he isn’t sure he deserves it, but he doesn’t want to stay on it, either. “Sooo…” he says, stalling, as if to remind Manny that he is still an idiot.

“So did you hear back about it, you fuckin’ dickhead?” It’s more of a kick him this time, still not hard enough to hurt. “I assume that’s why you’re finally coming clean.”

“Oh. Yes.” Nick redirects his attention to his phone as if he can hide behind it, as if he needs to study his notes before he finds the simple answer.

“ _Nick_.”

Nick can’t help it: he smirks. “It’s ours, baby.”

Manny laughs and grabs Nick by the collar only to shove him back before clambering awkwardly over to kiss him. “One of these days I’m gonna kick your ass,” he says.

“Looking forward to it,” Nick says before they stop talking again, in a slightly more interesting way than before.

  
  


**⇑↖↑**

  
  


The thing about Nick is he’s going to do what he wants, every time. Even when he knows it’ll piss Manny off, even when he knows Manny’s right to be pissed. They’re supposed to be a team, they’re supposed to make decisions together, but every time, if that overworking brain of his calculates the risk and finds it worth taking, it’s getting took.

And it was a beautiful fucking throw. It was an incredible, genius feat of back-of-a-napkin engineering. They’re going to be famous for it. Manny knows that, and a part of him would like to just be _proud_ , to be amazed and astonished at what his husband just pulled off.

But all he has room for in the deepening pit of his stomach is dread. Horrible, gut-curdling dread at the idea of going home alone, of spending a century apart. Having to leave Nick behind on the BSU field, if they make it that far, make his way home with nine footballs, making the greatest play of the game by himself. That isn’t how he wanted it. It’s never how he wanted it. Nick wants this for him, but Manny doesn’t want it without Nick.

“I could do it,” Nick’s saying. Manny’s still holding the phone to his ear, even though he feels so numb he’s surprised he hasn’t just dropped it. “I’d wait a hundred years.”

Manny doesn’t say anything. Of course Nick could do it. Nick can do anything he sets his mind to. Nick is the most stubborn, determined motherfucker on the planet. Manny fell in love with him for it; _needs_ him for it. Without Nick to push and prod and pull, Manny knows he wouldn’t have made it this far. He’s got plenty of stubbornness and determination himself, but not like Nick. It’s Nick that got him out here. Nick that knew the math. Nick who just lost a critical minute of runtime, all so Manny could make that run back across the desert alone.

Nick speaks again, his voice so quiet it almost sounds timid, which is the worst thing Manny’s ever heard: “Would you wait for me?”

He almost _wants_ to drop his phone. Just toss it aside, go for a walk, lie down in the grass and turn off for a while. He doesn’t want to answer that question; he doesn’t want it to be a question that had to get asked.

“Of course I fucking would,” he says finally, after he makes Nick wait a while. “I _will_. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to do that. I want you with me, every step of the way. And if we were gonna fuck with that, it should’ve been a choice we made together. That’s my fucking point, Nick.”

He hangs up before Nick can reply. They aren’t precious about how they end phone calls; not really much point when for 2,000 years they’ve known they’ll be able to talk in person within a few hours at the most. But it still feels jarring, cold, to just cut the call off like that. To leave Nick stranded one field over, no doubt staring at his phone wondering if he should call back. He doesn’t, of course; he won’t. They’ll see each other in a few days, like he said. Longest they’ll have been apart in quite a damn while.

And it’s awful. Manny isn’t looking forward to even a few nights alone. Silence is so much worse when he’s the only one making it. How the fuck is he gonna do a whole century, if that’s what it comes down to? If that’s how it has to be?

He’ll manage, like they always do, like they’ve managed so far. But he can’t really picture it, and he’s scared to do it, and he hasn’t felt that in so long he doesn’t remember how to fucking cope.

Eternity is a thing that bothers Nick, sometimes. The waiting. The uncertainty. The stuff that gets left behind. The urgency he still feels to keep moving, the restlessness he never quite grew out of. It’s never bothered Manny. Not like this. Not until now, when he realizes he’s staring down a tunnel of losing the thing he’s gotten so used to he didn’t know what it was to miss it.

He distantly remembers having made a long distance relationship work in college, knew even then it was possible, that all the bullshit about how long distance never works was just bullshit. But distance is different from time. And it scares him, not that something will be irrevocably broken, because it won’t; Nick will wait and Manny will wait, and they’ll eventually see each other again. But Manny is going to be so fucking lonely.

It feels so stupid to worry about that.

He calls Nick back at two in the morning and Nick answers like he hadn’t even been close to sleeping.

“I love you so fucking much,” Manny says aggressively, wanting instead to be pulling Nick into his arms, grumpily burrowing against him, having to settle for this. “And I’m so fucking mad at you. I don’t even know how I’m gonna make it three days.”

“You’ll make it,” says Nick, sounding impossibly confident, just like he did seven hundred years ago. “And I love you, too.”

He doesn’t apologize and Manny doesn’t expect him to. It wouldn’t be right if he did. This isn’t like any of the other stupid shit he’s done that needed an apology. This was something he believed in. Something he did because he’d done the math and he was certain it was the only way. Manny doesn’t think it was; Manny will never agree with him on that. But it doesn’t matter.

“Is your phone charged?” Nick asks.

“For once, yes,” says Manny a little dryly. He kept it in the charging block all night, just to make sure he didn’t fuck anything up. To avoid Nick snapping at him about it. No idea it would’ve been the smallest upset of the day if he had.

“Do you think we could just like…” Nick pauses, and Manny can hear him sort of struggling for the right words just by how his breathing stops and starts all uneven. “Could we just leave the call going all night? I just…”

He doesn’t finish saying it but Manny knows what he means to say. They both need sleep, and even though they often sleep alone, staying up in shifts to watch the field, neither of them remembers the last time they were so far apart they couldn’t hear each other breathing.

“Yeah,” says Manny, relenting softly. “That’d be good.”

  
  


**⇐**

  
  


716 years since they ran across that desert together. 716 years of making their way across a whole damn country, freezing their dicks off on the Minnesota field, picking their slantwise way down south, and then living, just living throughout Georgia, closing in on some destination they were never certain they’d see. 716 and 1,500 years of waiting, preparing, waiting, keeping each other company, keeping each other sane. 2,216 years of boredom, comfort, dumb jokes and familiar meals and stupid little arguments, of catching Manny smiling to himself and feeling the same kind of exhilaration as the first time, as far as he can remember. 2,216 years to this.

“It’s my fault, man, it’s my fault,” Manny’s saying, and he’s trembling slightly as Nick pulls him in, holds him close, their foreheads pressed together.

“You and me, babe,” Nick says, barely a whisper, as Manny shudders against him, like he’s got 2,216 years of built up adrenaline just pouring out in a heap now with nowhere else to go. “You and me.”

Manny quiets, seems to sort of sink into Nick’s embrace, surrendering to it. He’s exhausted, he’s devastated, and he blames himself for it even though it’s just as much Nick’s fault as no one’s. What can they do against the entirety of Oklahoma State crunching in around them? They could’ve gone a different route; they could’ve scouted smarter, waited longer, hidden better. There’s too many things they could’ve done, and no time to dwell on any of it. There’s only now, and what comes next, and the palpable sense of defeat settling over Manny, heavy in his arms, heavier than the pack of nine fucking footballs still burdening his back.

It’s about 7:30 now, Nick knows. Dawn of the day that shall define all others.

He takes a deep breath and lets it out.

“Can you do something for me?” he says.

“What?” Manny mumbles against his shoulder.

“Can you meet me in Missouri?” And Nick lets go, lets him go and gets to his feet and pivots on his heel and runs.

“Hey!” At first Manny is just startled, protesting the loss of contact. “Hey, what are you—”

And then he starts yelling. “HEY!!!” Nick hears, growing rapidly distant behind him. “HEY, WHAT THE FUCK—WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING?”

To Missouri, Nick thinks deliriously, somewhere in his lizard brain, the only part of it not occupied by running.

Nick runs. He runs like he’s never fucking run in his life. He runs until he reaches Donalson Parkway and then he veers sharply off the field, bolting down that blessedly, mercifully, sublimely smooth pavement. Navigating around the occasional car like a goddamn dancer. The parkway is over five miles long, he knows. Longer than the desert run and with less time to make it. He has to move about three minutes per mile wearing hiking boots and a backpack full of footballs. He has to do it without Manny.

  
  


Back on the field, to the OK State Coach, Manny is saying: “His name is Nick Navarro. He’s my husband. He finds a way to piss me off every goddamn day and he’s the fastest man you’ve ever seen.”

  
  


Nick feels like he’s going to die but he feels alive, too. He wishes Manny could see him. He wishes Manny was beside him. He doesn’t want to make Manny run the desert alone. Even as he eats up all the time he has left, even as he crushes every last second to dust on this road, he wishes there had been another way.

But there isn’t.

  
  


“I see what he did,” Manny’s telling Coach Evans. “He wanted to run on pavement. It’s the closest thing to a treadmill, that’s where he always makes the best time. We’ve been sprinting through woods for so long that actually running on pavement probably feels like a miracle. It’s like swinging a baseball bat with the donut off. He just took the balls and ran out on me a few minutes ago. All the math in the world says he can’t do this.”

  
  


His muscles are screaming, pushed way beyond the limit they thought they knew. There’s a sharpness in his chest when he breathes, the kind of pain he hasn’t felt in centuries. The kind of run he hasn’t done _ever_. Nick wonders if he’s going to reach Ole Miss and immediately fucking faint.

But he’s going to make it. He is going to make it.

  
  


“But right now he’s on pace to do it,” Manny says. “I think he’s actually gonna do it, because I know that man better than anyone, and there’s nothing he loves more than being right.”

  
  


His back is gonna come out all bruised from the way the footballs keep thudding against it. He’s going to come out looking like a piece of wet spaghetti. He can see the line of the field up ahead. Can feel the sun at his back. Heading westward. Heading home.

He skids off the pavement the moment he hits the field and drops, tumbling down into a ditch off the side of the road. He lies there for a moment staring at the sky, gasping and choking for air as he fumbles his phone out of his pocket.

He has 988 notifications, one e-mail per second lost of OBT.

He has twenty-five seconds left.

He did it.

Nick drops his phone in the dirt beside him and starts laughing, breathless and hoarse, and he doesn’t stop shuddering like he just wants to keep laughing even as he recovers his phone, picks himself up, stretches his legs and keeps running south.

  
  


Lacretia Evans calls off her play, admits defeat with the grace of one who knows little else. She asks Manny, “You waited 2,000 years for this? What makes you want to do this?”

Manny chuckles softly. His heart is hammering in his chest, hasn’t stopped this whole time, not even when he saw the scoreboard change over and knew Nick made it. He keeps his cool, but it’s a goddamn effort not to just spill over. “We ask each other that all the time,” he says. “I like to say that him and me are so damn crazy, of course we married each other. Nobody else would take us. I just need to try something impossible. That’s what it is for me. I need to find one of the rules of the world and break it.”

  
  


It doesn’t take Nick long to determine he’s clear of Oklahoma State players. Of anyone, in fact. It doesn’t totally make sense—they should’ve sent people to try to intercept or head him off somewhere. But no one comes. No call, either. He keeps an eye on his phone even as he slows to a more regular pace, but nothing comes, not even after he sends a text with his specific location in the half-assed code they occasionally use. It could bother him, under normal circumstances, could make him nervous. Not knowing how Manny feels, if he’s angry all over again like he was after Emory Gap. But it must’ve been Manny who arranged for Oklahoma State to call it off. And Manny’s coming to join him. Nick knows he is, better than he knows just about anything.

He can bear that silence a little longer.

  
  


←←

  
  


When Manny finds Nick in Missouri he doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t need to. Nick stands up, looking bedraggled, smiling in an exhausted sort of way, like he’s spent several straight days just smiling and smiling.

“There you are,” he says. “You finally gonna kick my ass, or what?”

Manny just grins and grabs a rough fistful of Nick’s shirt, hauling him in to kiss him. Nick makes a sound that’s caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and he doesn’t just smile into it, but melts. He wraps his arms around Manny like Manny’s the only thing holding him up. Manny kisses him for a long time, his grip gradually loosening as the pent-up tension leaves him, the urgency sated. He draws back but only by a few inches, his breath still warm and close. It won’t be a hundred years they have to wait now, but closer to a thousand with all the time Nick just burned. But if it comes to that, and if it’s like this when they see each other again, then…

Well, at least it’ll be like this.

“All right,” he says. “Let’s go.”

**⇐**


End file.
